Spicy fish stew in a glass bowl

11:47 PM 3/17/11

I had a positive experience with cooking.

Ingredients: fish, red onions, green onions, one jalapeno pepper, muenster cheese

I have been thinking for a while that I wanted to try using glass bakeware. I am chemical sensitive and I have had reactions to other types of cookware. I once had a brand new Teflon saucepan, and I didn't even heat it up on the stove - all I did was run some hot water over it - and the hot water was enough to make Teflon fumes that made me feel like I was going to pass out. (Teflon is the one that kills your pet birds. You can google it.)

I haven't cooked or done anything in the kitchen, partly because there is a bunch of junk sitting right in the way so I can't even walk in there, and partly because the last time I cooked, it was the bone marrow experiment, and there are still fumes in the fridge, so I haven't been using that fridge and haven't tried cooking.

Tonight I got a glass baking bowl from a company called Anchor Hocking Company. It's a round 2 qt bowl with a glass lid. I got that one because it was the only one at Wal-Mart that had a glass lid. Lots of other ones, like the Pyrex bakeware, only had plastic lids that were meant to be put on after the food was cooked, not during cooking. I don't want to just expose my food to the hot dry air in the oven. I will be cooking a lot of things that are sort of soupy or steamy, so I wanted a lid. I can't imagine making glass cookware without lids, but I guess most people don't cook the way I do and aren't looking for chemical-sensitive cookware.

Glass is cheap, too, and I like the idea that it's made from sand (although it's been tempered and had other processes done to it to make it tolerate the heat), and actually, it might not be made from sand exactly. I don't know. I also got a glass cutting board but didn't use that yet in tonight's meal.

Well, I was at Wal-Mart and I decided I would just choose something random and easy to cook. I like fish a lot. The only fish they had was just ordinary fillets (other than things like crab and lobster and clams and all that), so I got a bag of 3 small frozen haddock fillets.

I've wanted to try eating other parts of the fish, such as the head and eyes, ever since I read Weston Price and learned that some of the 'garbage' parts of the body have valuable nutrients in them, like vitamin A in the eyes. Some of this garbage gets made into pet food instead of people food.

When I got the whole blue crab last summer (I never mentioned that in my blog, but I was able to tolerate the blue crab), I ate the eyes, and I ate the internal organs including the intestine. (The intestine of a blue crab looks, feels, and tastes exactly like Ramen Noodles.) The seafood lady told me not to eat the lungs, and she described the lungs as 'the spongy things.' They are sort of tough and spongy. She said that either they're not palatable (gross and yucky or hard to chew), or else they make you sick. I understood, after having eaten bone marrow, that 'it makes you sick' doesn't necessarily mean it has germs or parasites. Ordinary substances that occur in meats can make you sick. Every organ of the animal has to be tested very carefully and eaten in extremely small pieces, very slowly, the first time you try it.

So here is how I cooked it. This is the random, unplanned, spontaneous way of cooking that I usually do. I got a pack of pre-chopped red onions, and a pack of pre-chopped green onions, the scallion-type things, if that's what they're called. I dumped out the whole pack of both of them into the bowl. I put them in the bowl as a 'bed' because I didn't have any oil to use to coat the surface of the bowl so the fish wouldn't burn on the bottom. So I was going to put the fish on top of this bed of vegetables instead of directly on the bottom.

I chopped up my one whole jalapeno pepper. I love strong-tasting hot spicy vegetables, so a lot of my foods contain things like onions, garlic, and hot peppers, and those things are exactly the kind of things that I can't find anywhere from the fast food places where I've been buying food for so long - all their food is bland! I hate bland foods and I hate foods that don't have any decent vegetables in them.

Not only that, but in my experience, every time I've felt as though I had intestinal parasites, I've eaten hot peppers and the tickly crawly sharp pains go away quickly. (Yes, I actually feel tickly crawly things biting the insides of my intestines. That used to happen a lot more often when I was living next to the duckpond full of snails, where all you had to do was walk beside the pond and the invisible parasites would crawl into your legs and burrow through the skin and go through your bloodstream to your intestines. I'm talking about this subject while writing about what I've eaten for dinner!)

So I put the jalapeno into the bed of vegetables, and all three frozen fillets on top. You're supposed to thaw the fillets out first, but I didn't want to wait for them. So I just put the lid on, set the oven to 375 degrees, let it preheat a little bit (but not all the way), and then threw it in the oven for a random amount of time. I started the timer at 15 minutes, but kept adding more time because they weren't even thawed out yet. So I cooked them for maybe 45 minutes total after adding more time here and there.

The frozen fillets added more time to the cooking. If you used thawed fish, you'd cook it much less time, and it probably wouldn't do what it did. The results would have been different. The red onions had time to cook a lot, and lost water into the bottom of the bowl so it looked like a stew. I hadn't added any water at all. I don't mind it. I like the idea of fish soup.

Now that it was done, I finally added some slices of Muenster cheese. I didn't want the cheese to get overcooked or burned, so that's why I added it after I took it out of the oven. It doesn't have to be that particular kind of cheese. It was a random choice. I just picked one that didn't have any artificial colors in it. I mixed up the chunks of cheese. They added a little bit of fat to it so it would be satisfying.

I ate it and it was wonderful. I actually felt sleepy after a little while. I don't usually feel sleepy after eating, but remembered it from a long time ago. Apparently fast food doesn't make me feel sleepy after I eat it, but home cooked food does.

The hot peppers were a little too hot and I had to get used to them and be a little bit careful around them and try not to put two slices in my mouth at one time.

It was simple, healthy, pleasant, satisfying, and it required barely any preparation time. I just threw things together in the bowl.

I took a picture of the bowl of spicy fish stew. Sorry I can't attach it here, but it's on my 'real' camera, which has to go through a couple different processes before I can get pictures onto the computer.

I'll be cooking more things like this in the future.